Advanced Content provides interactivity in the

HD DVD HD DVD (short for High Definition Digital Versatile Disc) is an obsolete high-density optical disc format for storing data and playback of high-definition video. Supported principally by Toshiba, HD DVD was envisioned to be the successor to the ...

optical disc format. Advanced Content is used to provide interactive menus and "special features" such as additional bonus/extras content and games for

(one of the high-definition video formats). The Advanced Content

runtime engine In computer programming, a runtime system or runtime environment is a sub-system that exists both in the computer where a program is created, as well as in the computers where the program is intended to be run. The name comes from the compile ...

is responsible for responding to user navigation input (e.g., from a remote control) as well as events set to occur during playback of a movie, controlling all actions and interactive properties during the playback of a movie. The Advanced Content specification was developed by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...

and

Disney The Walt Disney Company, commonly known as Disney (), is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, California. Disney was originally founded on October ...

with input from other members of the

DVD Forum The DVD Forum is an international organization composed of hardware, software, media and production companies that use and develop the DVD and formerly HD DVD formats. It was initially known as the DVD Consortium when it was founded in 1995. ...

including

Toshiba , commonly known as Toshiba and stylized as TOSHIBA, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. Its diversified products and services include power, industrial and social infrastructure systems, ...

and

Sonic Solutions Sonic Solutions was an American computer software company headquartered in Novato, California. In addition to having a number of offices in the U.S., the company also maintained offices in Europe and Asia. It was acquired by Rovi Corporation in 20 ...

. Advanced Content also enables network access to download additional content and access to persistent storage which is used for storing bookmarks and other state information. The ability to play back Advanced Content is a mandatory part of the HD DVD-Video specification. Its features were defined by content providers (specifically

and

Warner Bros. Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (commonly known as Warner Bros. or abbreviated as WB) is an American film and entertainment studio headquartered at the Warner Bros. Studios complex in Burbank, California, and a subsidiary of Warner Bros. D ...

) based on the scenarios they required for a next generation disc format. The most popular implementation of Advanced Content (running in both the Toshiba HD DVD players and Microsoft Xbox 360 add-on) is Microsoft's

HDi The Human Development Index (HDI) is a statistic composite index of life expectancy, education (mean years of schooling completed and expected years of schooling upon entering the education system), and per capita income indicators, wh ...

. The rival

Blu-ray The Blu-ray Disc (BD), often known simply as Blu-ray, is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 2005 and released on June 20, 2006 worldwide. It is designed to supersede the DVD format, and capable of st ...

format does not use Advanced Content. It uses

BD-J BD-J, or Blu-ray Disc Java, is a specification supporting Java ME (specifically the Personal Basis Profile of the Connected Device Configuration or CDC) Xlets for advanced content on Blu-ray Disc and the Packaged Media profile of Globally Execut ...

instead.

Technology

Advanced Content is written using the declarative

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

language and the imperative

ECMAScript ECMAScript (; ES) is a JavaScript standard intended to ensure the interoperability of web pages across different browsers. It is standardized by Ecma International in the documenECMA-262 ECMAScript is commonly used for client-side scripti ...

language. Advanced Content applications are very similar in structure to

AJAX Ajax may refer to: Greek mythology and tragedy * Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea * Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris * ''Ajax'' (play), by the ancient Gree ...

applications on the web, using a combination of script and markup in an asynchronous execution model. A "page" is created using markup and it can be modified over time based on user input, the progression of the movie, and so on. A new "page" may be loaded as needed (e.g., when switching to a different part of the application) and the process starts again. Advanced Content includes an XML element grammar based on

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaS ...

for content such as images, buttons, text, etc.; An XML attribute grammar based on

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone technolo ...

and

XSL In computing, the term Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is used to refer to a family of languages used to transform and render XML documents. Historically, the W3C XSL Working Group produced a draft specification under the name "XSL," whic ...

to describe layout, color, font types, etc.; and an element and attribute grammar based on SMIL for timing, animation, eventing, and synchronization. Whilst it is possible to write complex, interactive pages using only the declarative XML dialect, any interactions with the player itself (e.g., to change audio language or jump to a new title) requires imperative code written in ECMAScript. To support the ECMAScript code, Advanced Content defines a large number of objects, properties, and methods (" APIs") that are analogous to the DOM in a web browser; these APIs allow the script to query and control the player, animate the markup page, respond to user events, and connect to the

internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, p ...

to download new content such as trailers, cast & crew bios, or other information.

HDi

HDi (formerly iHD) is

's implementation of the Advanced Content interactivity layer in

. It is used in the

Xbox 360 The Xbox 360 is a home video game console developed by Microsoft. As the successor to the original Xbox, it is the second console in the Xbox series. It competed with Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generati ...

HD DVD add-on as well as stand-alone HD DVD players. Applications written for HDi are written using the XML dialect and ECMAScript, the latter of which is processed by the

JScript JScript is Microsoft's legacy dialect of the ECMAScript standard that is used in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 11 and older. JScript is implemented as an Active Scripting engine. This means that it can be "plugged in" to OLE Automation applica ...

engine when running on Microsoft Windows platforms. The HDi runtime exposes the APIs defined by the Advanced Content standard. It provides only a single threaded programming model, though certain operations (such as network and persistent storage access) are executed as asynchronous operations. An

movie, including the interactive functionality, is presented as an Advanced Content application, which is executed and rendered by the HDi runtime. The advanced content application consists of the

playlist A playlist is a list of video or audio files that can be played back on a media player either sequentially or in a shuffled order. In its most general form, an audio playlist is simply a list of songs, but sometimes a loop. The term has sev ...

files (.xpl), subtitles (.xas), markup files (.xmu) and scripts (.js) in addition to the actual video, in a defined directory structure. The HDi runtime parses the markup and the scripts to execute the action. The playback of the video, along with its integration with the rest of the navigation system, is initiated from and controlled by script code. The HDi runtime is responsible for execution and final rendering of the movie playback and navigation application. The markup is parsed into a

Document Object Model The Document Object Model (DOM) is a cross-platform and language-independent interface that treats an XML or HTML document as a tree structure wherein each node is an object representing a part of the document. The DOM represents a document wi ...

, which allows ECMAScript code to control and modify the UI layout during execution. By dynamically altering the layout of UI widgets is how animations and interactivity is achieved. The DOM and associated APIs is used to enable other scenarios such as pausing playback and replacing it with the navigation UI, or seeking to a certain area in the movie (used for either manual seek or seeking to bookmarks). For the rendering stack, it presents six ''planes'' (which are containers for graphics) that are layered in front of each other. The final image displayed is the composition of the images from the individual planes. The composition of the planes into the final image is handled by the HDi runtime. These rendering layers, from back to front, are: # Background plane: The background plane defines the background color for the application. # Main video plane: When Main video is visible, it is displayed on this plane. # Sub video plane: When Secondary video (such as picture-in-picture) is playing, it is displayed on this plane. # Subtitles graphics plane: All subtitles (both standard and advanced) and are rendered on this plane. # Application graphics plane: The UI rendered by the script and markup is displayed on this plane. # Cursor plane: The cursor, if visible, is displayed on this plane. Microsoft does not provide design tools for development of HDi applications, though third parties have made such tools available. Because the components used by Advanced Content (and HDi) -

XSL-FO XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects) is a markup language for XML document formatting that is most often used to generate PDF files. XSL-FO is part of XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language), a set of W3C technologies designed for the transformation and ...

XPath XPath (XML Path Language) is an expression language designed to support the query or transformation of XML documents. It was defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and can be used to compute values (e.g., strings, numbers, or Boolean v ...

- are widely used, any development tool supporting these can be used to develop HDi applications. However, Microsoft has made an HDi simulator available as a free download, as a part of the HD DVD Interactivity Jumpstart Kit, to let users author and debug HDi content on computers running

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was release to manufacturing, released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Wind ...

, although this is not intended as a full authoring tool nor a playback device. HDi is not inherently limited to being used on optical media; it can be used on media delivered or streamed over the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, p ...

or any other network. In fact, on October 4, 2007, Toshiba and Microsoft announced the creation of the Advanced Interactivity Consortium (AIC) to "extend and promote interactive experiences beyond optical media to new platforms."

Advanced Interactivity Consortium

The Advanced Interactivity Consortium (AIC) was to be an open forum designed to extend the Advanced Content interactive capabilities of

to new devices and delivery mechanisms. It was jointly announced by

and

on October 4, 2007 but never implemented. The companies included in the announcement included: * Microsoft * Toshiba *

DreamWorks Animation DreamWorks Animation LLC (DWA, also known as DreamWorks Animation Studios and simply known as DreamWorks) is an American animation studio that produces animated films and television programs and is a subsidiary of Universal Pictures, a divisio ...

* Paramount *

Universal Studios Universal Pictures (legally Universal City Studios LLC, also known as Universal Studios, or simply Universal; common metonym: Uni, and formerly named Universal Film Manufacturing Company and Universal-International Pictures Inc.) is an Americ ...

Examples

Some examples of Advanced Content on HD DVD are: * Interactive features such as picture-in-picture, story boards, actor biographies,

GPS The Global Positioning System (GPS), originally Navstar GPS, is a satellite-based radionavigation system owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Space Force. It is one of the global navigation satellite sy ...

, and "Tech specs" on many

titles, branded as " U-Control" * Passive features such as picture-in-picture and story boards on many

titles, branded as In Movie Experience * User-defined chapter points, known as "Bookmarks" or "My Scenes" found on many titles from various studios * Downloadable features such as a colouring book on for '' Shrek the Third'' from

* Downloadable trailers and other content on various titles, including ''

Freedom Freedom is understood as either having the ability to act or change without constraint or to possess the power and resources to fulfill one's purposes unhindered. Freedom is often associated with liberty and autonomy in the sense of "giving one ...

'' from

Bandai Visual was a Japanese anime, film production, and distribution enterprise, established by Bandai and a subsidiary of Bandai Namco Holdings. They focused mainly in international distribution of anime properties in North America. Most of the anime and f ...

* On-line shopping for goods and services depicted in the film, such as '' Evan Almighty'' from Universal Studios

References

Bibliography

External links

HDi trademark press release

MSDN HD DVD Authoring Forum

MSFT Peter Torr's HDi Blog

MSFT Amy Dullard's Application Development for HD DVD Blog

* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20061031201356/http://www.duplicatorguide.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=270&Itemid=2 HP Pressures Blu-Ray Camp
Microsoft's Amir Majidimehr describes the genesis of HDi (and other things)

{{High definition media Film and video technology HD DVD High-definition television Interactive television